Removal of Many Pay Phones Poses Problems for Small-Town Residents

The pay phone in Goodyears Bar, population 100, is gone. So is the one in Gazelle, population 400, and the one at the public school in pint-sized Pike.

The ubiquitous pay phone is disappearing from lonely outposts and city street corners throughout the state, the victim of cellular phone competition and other economic pressures.

In the last year, companies yanked out about 1,000 pay phones a month in California. No one is predicting that coin box phones will vanish from the landscape, but their declining numbers are stirring outcries in rural settlements and urban neighborhoods alike.

The loss is particularly painful in the back country, where cell phones may not work and some residents may not have a phone line to their house.

“It doesn’t sound really serious when you say, ‘Take a pay phone out here and there,’ if you live in a city,” said Siskiyou County Supervisor Bill Hoy. “But when you take one out of a community and it’s 10, 20 miles or 100 miles to the next pay phone, it’s different.”

Since Gazelle, a farm and ranch community about 20 miles from Mt. Shasta, lost its lone pay phone last fall, Postmaster Barry Thomsen has had to come to the rescue of a local woman with pneumonia and a man who ran out of kerosene to heat his trailer.

They both asked him to phone for help, which he did.

“I just wonder, if there’s a real emergency when I’m not open, what people do,” Thomsen said.

Sure, they can go to a house, he said, but “if [the residents] don’t know you and it’s dark, some of these people are not going to be eager to open their door.”

Thomsen is crossing his fingers that the nearest pay phone, nine miles away, doesn’t get carted off as well.

Over in Goodyears Bar in scantily populated Sierra County, Cheryl Morse tried without success to get Pacific Bell to reinstall the public phone that was removed in late 1999 from the spot where it had stood for at least two decades, next to an old one-room schoolhouse.

“Tragedies happen, and we need that phone booth there. It’s that simple,” she said.

Cell phones don’t work in the little enclave, next to a fork of the Yuba River popular with rafters. “It’s just scary that there is no phone there now for any kind of emergency,” Morse said. “That river is used a lot.”

Pacific Bell is in the process of taking out about 22,000 of the 140,000 pay phones it owns in California. Other companies are pulling out some of their public phones.

There are now 258,658 pay phones in California, compared with 270,000 a year ago, according to the state Public Utilities Commission.

Pay phone owners say the shrinking numbers are a simple product of economics.

The cell phone explosion has stolen customers, and the growing use of 800 numbers and debit cards has made it harder for pay phone companies to collect fees from carriers.

Changes in federal regulations in 1996 also barred phone companies from subsidizing their pay phone divisions with revenue from other parts of their operation.

All that means that unprofitable pay phones are under scrutiny as never before.

“I think there’s a lot of phone removal to come,” said Thomas Keane, president of the California Pay Phone Assn. and chief executive of Pacific Coin, which owns pay phones in California, Arizona and Nevada.

The trend is evident across the country.

Vince Sandusky, president of the American Public Communications Council, which represents the pay phone industry, estimated that the number of pay phones peaked nationally in 1998 at 2.6 million. That figure has since fallen by more than 400,000.

Martin Garrick, who owns a small pay phone company in San Diego, goes so far as to characterize his industry as “a buggy whip business” on the wane because of market and technology forces.

“Having a pay phone that someone has to clean and repair every month when that’s no longer subsidized is no longer feasible,” he said.

Pacific Bell media relations director John Britton and other phone industry representatives pointed out that California does have a fund that will subsidize public phones if they are deemed necessary for public health and safety.

The PUC said a number of applications to the fund are pending, but there are now only 75 such phones in the state.

And if a store owner or community really feels a pay phone is necessary, Garrick said, they can install their own for $1,500 to $2,000 and then pay monthly line fees of $30 to $50.

Indeed, Britton said that after Pacific Bell removed pay phones from campuses in a Bay Area school district, officials decided to lease seven phones to get them back on school grounds.

That’s unlikely to happen at Pliocene Ridge Schools in the Sierra County hamlet of Pike.

“Ha ha,” responded special education teacher Rayette Ringle when asked whether the school might replace the phone removed by Pacific Bell last year.

The 100 or so students at the small school, kindergarten through 12th grade, greatly miss the pay phone, she said. “It makes you feel like you’re connected. It was scary to see it ripped out.”